rsnapshot tips&tricks

July 19, 2009

rsnapshot is a great application for taking backups. It uses rsync and hard links, and makes backup management very easy. It comes with a nice perl script, rsnapreport, which reads the output of the rsync commands used by rsnapshot, and prints a useful report, with the stats of each rsync command.

A typical configuration would set up a cronjob, in which the output of the rsnapshot sync command(or rsnapshot daily, if the sync_first option is not enabled), is piped to rsnapreport, and the output of rsnapreport is piped to a CLI SMTP client, to send us a mail with the stats of the sync operation.(sendEmail is a very nice SMTP client ;) ).

However, if you’re taking backups from multiple machines, the sync operation can last longer than expected. So, if the datablock timeout in our SMTP server isn’t large enough, we will never get an email.

This is solved if we use a wrapper script for the rsnapshot sync operation. We use that script for the cronjob, and inside the script we have something like this:
#!/bin/sh
rsnapshot sync > /tmp/rsync_stats 2>&1
cat /tmp/rsync_stats | rsnapreport.pl | sendEmail -f backup@foo -t user@bar -u rsnapshot report
rm -f /tmp/rsync_stats